Portability of software applications between computing platforms has been an issue among software developers and users since beginning of the software industry. Platform independent languages such as Java have been developed in order to address this issue. However, Java and other languages claiming to be platform independent require an interpreter running on the same computing platform so as to convert the platform independent code into instructions the processor upon which the code is running on can understand and execute. Because of the requirement for an additional level of processing, i.e. interpreting, code written in Java and other platform independent languages typically runs less efficiently and requires relatively greater resources than code performing the same function in a processor's native language, code compiled specifically for the processor the code is running on. Therefore, code written in Java or another platform independent language usually runs slower than functionally equivalent code in a processor's native language, machine language produced by a compiler.
One solution for speeding up the performance of applications written in platform independent languages is to offload some operations to concurrently running applications written in the processor's native language and to use a mediation protocol to interact between the two applications.